Yahoo! gutted a Silicon Valley speech company leaving it with just one engineer on a vital project, a court heard today. Nuance Communications is seeking an injunction to prevent twelve of thirteen employees poached by Yahoo! from working on related projects at the ad and media giant. It also alleges the dirty dozen, which includes former VP of R&D Larry Heck, stole trade secrets from Nuance.

Business leaders from across a wide spectrum of industries including entertainment, pharmaceuticals, and software companies met in London yesterday to globalise industry's fight against counterfeiting and piracy.

It seems like every other week I'm reviewing yet another tiny Pentax five megapixel compact camera. In fact a quick browse through my camera samples folder shows that this is the eighth one that I've written about this year. Come on Pentax, give my aching fingers a break, writes Cliff Smith.

The prospect of landfill sites pilled high with disposable DVDs has once again reared its ugly head on the shoulders of claims that Microsoft is touting just such a product to Hollywood as way to beat movie piracy.

A federally funded group of voting system experts called on the United States' Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the nation's state-run elections, to revamp its recommended process for evaluating the security of electronic voting devices.

Google's internet library project will face competition from Yahoo!, but also from a less predictable rival: the European Commission announced its own plan on Friday. And it has an advantage: if copyright laws interfere with its plans it can change the laws.

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, considered a contender in the recent papal race, has apparently distanced himself from remarks he made in the New York Times in July when he said that an "unguided, unplanned process of natural selection" was not "true".

The British government is trying to use its presidency of the EU to push through a European directive would give police more powers to act against copyright infringers than they currently have to deal with suspected terrorists, according to the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).

The US Patent and Trademarks Office has thrown out two Microsoft patents on its FAT file system. The case had been raised by open source defenders who feared that Microsoft was preparing a legal offensive against Linux based on enforcement of intellectual property rights. But the Patent Office rejected the patents because of an administrative technicality - not because of prior art submitted by the F/OSS team.

The following letter was sent from a K12 school account in a southern US state. It illustrates the problems facing both paid legal download services, such as Apple's iTunes Music Store and Napster, and the RIAA's attempt to combat the illegal download services.